Alan Macanespie scratched his belly through the gap in his shirt buttons and slurped milky coffee from a cardboard carton. Theo Proctor's lip curled in disgust as his colleague belched sour breath across the table. 'You are disgusting, you know that?' The Welshman waved a hand in front of his face and reached for his bottle of mineral water.
'Just because you've no idea what a Saturday night's for doesn't mean the rest of us have to behave like we're a bunch of choirboys.' Macanespie shifted in his chair, his stomach following his movement like a sine wave of fat. 'After listening to that twat Cagney yesterday, I needed to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I've got better things to do with my Sunday morning than deal with this pile of crap.' He scowled at a stack of folders piled on the table by Proctor's hand. The loser's hand that Cagney had dealt them had left him feeling bitter and insecure; unless he could see some light at the end of the tunnel that wasn't an oncoming train, he felt he was staring at an undistinguished and premature end to a pretty low-key career.
Proctor laid a slim hand on top of the pile. 'No, you haven't. Not if you want to keep your pension. Cagney's got it in for the likes of us. He's got a chip on his shoulder and he thinks the only thing us hard-working grunts are any use for is to make him look good.'
Macanespie snorted. 'He's got his bloody Savile Row suits for that.'
'And he wants the bosses to think those bloody Savile Row suits are where he belongs. So he needs results and if he doesn't get them, he'll have to hang somebody out to dry – and I sure as hell don't want it to be me.' Proctor flicked his laptop open and tapped it into life. 'After WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, the one thing they're all paranoid about is leaks. And let's be honest, you can't look at what's been happening on our watch and not think somebody's been taking the law into their own hands.'
Macanespie burped again, glaring at the coffee carton as if it were somehow responsible for his own lack of finesse. He ran a hand over his ginger stubble and sighed. 'And nobody gave a shit. Getting rid of that human sewage was doing the world a favour.'
'You'd better not let Wilson Cagney hear you say that.' Proctor frowned as he summoned up a spreadsheet. The fine black hairs on the backs of his bony fingers made them look like magnified insect legs as they scuttled across the keys. 'You're single, Alan. You've no kids. You might have nothing ahead of you but drinking yourself into an early grave, but I've got to think about Lorna and the girls.'
There was a stony silence. Macanespie was motionless, his face revealing nothing of what was going on inside. Proctor had gone too far. For years, he and Macanespie had worked well together because they'd maintained a studied indifference to each other's faults. It was like a marriage in a Catholic country before divorce had become legalised. They were stuck with each other and so they'd made the best of a bad job, pretending their mutual contempt didn't exist, avoiding comment on the personal habits they despised. Proctor had never criticised Macanespie's drinking or his disgusting departures from what the Welshman considered obligate personal hygiene. For his part, Macanespie had tolerated finicky behaviour that he reckoned was borderline OCD and never complained about Proctor's perpetual displays of family photographs and endless tedious narratives about the brilliant, beautiful, erudite, talented paragons that were his daughters. That effective concordat had been blown out of the water by Wilson Cagney's display of gunboat diplomacy. Now it seemed Proctor was happy to throw him under the bus, his sole justification the failure of Macanespie's last relationship to go the distance. Probably, the Scotsman thought, he'd always been jealous because the fact that Macanespie hadn't been married meant she hadn't been able to take him to the cleaners after the split. Served her right. Macanespie had asked her to marry him more than once, but she'd always sidestepped the offer. So she walked out the door with no more than she walked in with. But Proctor, he was stuck with the prim and proper Lorna till death. Served him right, frankly.
Macanespie cleared his throat. 'Remind me. What are we looking at?'
'Over the past eight years, there have been eleven instances of an ICTFY target being assassinated within days of when they were due to be arrested.' Proctor called up another screen and frowned at it. 'The paperwork had been processed, the operation had been ordered. But in the gap between set-up and execution-' He flushed as he realised the inappropriateness of his choice of words.
'-there was an execution,' Macanespie blurted, only too predictably. Sometimes he couldn't help himself. That Scottish black humour just wouldn't sit quietly in the corner. 'And how many of those cases were ours?'
'Eight had Brits leading the investigation. The other three had Brits on the team.'
'The same Brits?'
Proctor ran his finger down the screen. 'Doesn't look like it. Alexandra Reid was second string on two cases then led one. Will Pringle led three, Derek Green led two and helped out on a third, and Patterson Tait headed up the other two. So we can probably rule them out as our vigilante. But we'll have to work our way down the totem pole in every case to find the common factor. The mole.'
Macanespie grunted. 'You're kidding, right? You're not seriously talking about embarking on the biggest waste of time this side of the 1987 Labour Party election campaign? We all know what this has been about. It's been a kind of ethnic cleansing of scumbags. Scrubbing the Balkans clean of the gobshites that made it hell on earth in the nineties. You know and I know the top name in the frame for all of these assassinations.'
Proctor breathed heavily through his nose. He pursed his lips and scowled at his computer, stabbing the keys as if they were Macanespie's eyes. 'We don't know that,' he growled.
'"We don't know that,"' Macanespie mimicked in a mimsy voice. 'It's been common knowledge round here for years, Theo. Don't start pretending you don't know what I'm talking about.'
'It's just rumour and gossip.'
'Rumour and gossip that nobody's ever contradicted in my hearing. The Balkan boys, they all give a nod and a wink whenever people start going on about what a funny coincidence it is that another sadistic fucker with a war crimes record as long as your arm gets the wooden overcoat before we can get him into custody.'
Proctor shook his head. 'Doesn't make it the truth. It's just a good story.'
'It's a story that fits the facts. That's why it keeps coming up again and again.' Macanespie began ticking off the points on his fat fingers. 'Who knows all the key players from way back when? Who's the kind of great big fucking hero that half the bloody Balkans would lie their slivovitz-guzzling heads off to protect? Who shouted his mouth off to every news organisation that would listen about how useless ICTFY was before he went underground just a matter of weeks before the first assassination?'
Proctor realigned the edges of his pile of files. They didn't need it. 'You're talking about Dimitar Petrovic.'
'Exactly.' Macanespie stuck two thumbs up and grinned triumphantly. 'You always get there in the end, Theo. Takes some pushing, but you always get to the top of the hill.'
'As usual, Alan, you're completely missing the point. Even if you're right about Petrovic – and I'm not conceding that you are – even if you're right, it still doesn't get us off the hook. Wilson Cagney probably knows all about Petrovic already. Petrovic isn't the issue here. The issue is where Petrovic is getting his information from. Somebody's pointing him in the right direction, Alan. And from where Cagney's sitting, it looks like one of us or else somebody very bloody close.'
